1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates an information providing apparatus, an information providing method, an information providing program, and a recording medium for providing information pertaining to a user.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, in an information system including plural computers, a server is provided for collectively managing plural sets of information pertaining to respective users of the system (referred to as ‘user attribute information’ hereinafter), and conducting user authentication of a user (such server being referred to as ‘user management server’ hereinafter). A domain controller provided in a Windows (registered trademark) environment is one representative example of such a system.
An application implemented in such an information system may access the user management server to authenticate the user of the application and/or acquire user attribute information of the user in an efficient manner. In the prior art, the user attribute information managed in the user management server corresponds to general information that may be commonly used among plural applications implemented in the system, and thereby, user attribute information dedicated to each individual application has to be managed separately by the corresponding application.
However, when user attribute information dedicated to a particular application is managed separately from the user management system, the application has to take into account the fact that the user attribute information is managed in plural areas. As a result, the implementation of the application may be complicated.
To counter such a problem, the user attribute information dedicated to an application may be assigned to an unused area of the user management system, or a database scheme of the user management system may be extended so that the user attribute information dedicated to an application may be assigned to the extended area. However, in the former case, the scalability of the user management system may be lost, and in the latter case, the number of items being managed by the user management service may be increased. Also, providing user attribute information dedicated to a particular application within the user management system intended for common use among plural applications may result in loss of versatility of the user management system.
Accordingly, a technique is desired for integrally providing to an application user attribute information provided within the user management system and user attribute information dedicated to the particular application without having to add changes to the user management system.
Also, in some cases, it may be desired that the authority of a user with respect to a particular application be defined according to a classification scheme that is different from group information that is managed by the user management system. By defining the authority of a user with respect to a particular application according to a classification scheme that is different from the group information managed by the user management system, for example, a user that is recognized as a general user within the user management system may be recognized as an administrator user within a particular application. In such case, a convenient system may be realized if user authority information within the user management system and user authority information dedicated to a particular application may be integrally provided to the application.